Odette Dulac

Odette Dulac (14 July 1865 – 3 November 1939) was a French actress, singer and diseuse in the manner of Yvette Guilbert.

Odette Dulac, photographed by Reutlinger, 1903

Background

Dulac was born in Aire-sur-Adour. She became a militant feminist and novelist. La houille rouge: les enfants de la violence (The Red Coal, 1916) narrated the horrors of raped and impregnated Frenchwomen at the time the First World War was being waged, in an anti-abortion polemic of triumphing French nationalism.^[1] She became a member of the Ligue des droits de femme (League for Women's Rights).

At the start of her public career, as a singer-actress, she appeared in light opera at Antwerp in 1895 and was soon a star at the Théâtre des Bouffes Parisiens,^[2] where she appeared in André Messager's operetta, Les p'tites Michu (1897). In London, at the Empire Theatre, she had a hit with The Honeysuckle and the Bee.^[3]

Turning her hand to modelling witty caricatures, she performed Don Juan of Boulevard X at the Salon Humouriste, Paris 1908.^[4]

Aside from La houille rouge, she published Le droit de plaisir (1908), her first novel; a feminist erotic text, Faut-il? (1919), a case of love for a mutilated soldier; Les Désexués: roman de moeurs (1924) co-authored with Charles-Etienne about the downfall of a gay man in 1920s Paris; Tel quel (1926), denouncing social and religious hypocrisy and encouraging women to speak up for themselves;^[5] and Leçons d'amour (1929).

Notes

1. Susan R. Grayzel, Women's Identities at War: Gender, Motherhood, and Politics in Britain and, (UNC Press) 1999, "The maternal body as battlefield" pp. 73–77.
2. The New York Times Illustrated Magazine Supplement, "The drama", 21 May 1899.
3. Ernest Henry Short and Arthur Compton-Rickett, Ring Up the Curtain: Being a Pageant of English Entertainment..., (London) 1938:121.
4. It was illustrated in The Bookman 27, March–August 1908 p. 588.
5. Alexandre Destais